Good point!

The mall was still centralized and most shops didnt have their own place and a stall ij the mall but I can totally see where you’re coming from.

It might be a good idea to keep this in mind if this ever becomes reality and we need marketing ideas. :)

Thank you for this friendly and encouraging offer. This goes a long way sowing trust. I feel a lot more positive about looking into it now. Have a nice weekend.

You’re missing that these points have already been adressed in a lot of other comments and have been stated way more constructively.

Of course having a whole logistics setup in place will be far superior to only doing dropshipping. But this is a whole different (additional) project. It absolutely has it is place. What I’m dismissing is the claim that the idea is dependent on somehow cloning the arguably much more expensive and complex parts of amazons business.

Again, i do agree that amazon has a huge machinery in place. But I also wish to discuss things without being treated dismissively myself.

I’m very happy you reveal your actual intent by personally attacking me instead of taking the hint. Good bye.

This is incredibly valuable advice! Thank you so much!

My current stance on federation is of course opt in and requires the main seller to trust the downstream vendors.

The main point is that this already happens for a large portion of thing you can buy. I sell computers and adjacent services, classical system integration if you will. Of course I have to buy the systems from vendors and resell them to my customers.

Many system integrators have shops where some of them rely on custom integration of vendor apis. Take minecraft server sites for example that have an automated integration with a hosting company’s api (eg hetzner). you as a customer just order a server, their automation makes the order processing with hetzner and provisions the server for you.

Now make this over a non custom but standardized api, eg activity pub.

I might still be overlooking stuff but from a technical standpoint this should be doable. The legal aspect is interesting, although I think this could be done similar to already existing resellers.

Feel free to point out flaws obvious to you. I appreciate your feedback massively.

Very much decentralized. Just with the caveat that payment decentrlization needs its own project. Successful foss software projects typically have a narrow scope and concentrate on them. Feel free to do the payment part in an adjacent project so that we dont have yo rely on stripe and paypal.

I wont correct you since I’m not the authority. I think your point is valid.

In my idea, the shop you visit - lets call them computer store - will sell you a range of computers, some of their own assembly, with normal margin, like its done today. What changes is that they partner with another shop (or many) that sell adjacent products. That could be a desk for the computer, software or other products. Those products are manually federated, ie the partners have been vetted by computer store. If you buy the computer, the seller makes their typical margin. If you buy the desk, no matter if additionally or exclusively, they will only manage the order process and payment. The rest will be done over classical dropshipping. Meaning the original desk seller will handle everything after the sale has taken place. Same as amzon does with many of their products, same as aliexpress and ebay but better than ebay because the computer store owner keeps control of the vendors they partner with. They receive a small fee only which would not be enough on its own but they arguably dont have any work besides processing the order.

Since this was another round of no additional input, I’ll repeat myself too:

People have already suggested that. But thanks for participating.

I fully agree that this would be a valid application. The reason any company doesnt adopt such strategies is the cost of pioneering it. Most companies who spearhead such an idea want it to pay off -> proprietary. Also most people are specialized in their industry. Developing an app is not native to food industry for example.

There you go. Glad you like it.

You obviously didnt get the point. These stores already exist and they’re not big.

I do get the specialization idea and I think its valid. i just dont see how to make that federated and why only for books as I’m not talking about a service, really. Its a network.

And for the people with internet, tv, radio or access to newspapers:

the police can make you look at the camera to unlock your phone (for example to check if you’re aiding refugees from the ethnic lgbtq cleansing) but they cant (easily and in some countries legally) force you to type in a pin and password. I know the point is a bit moot for a pc as at that point the will just rip out your drive, assuming its not encrypted.

Still, worth mentioning imo.

Glad you found something that works for you mate. Still, this corpo-soft-lock-in-shit isn’t cool man. I get it, you want it easy and reliable. But this aint it. The stuff I’m talking about here is kind of the middle inbetween local seller and wholesale chain store. Thats why I like the idea.

Thats an interesting bit of information. Thanks! :)

I’ll have to look into it at some point. The crypto bros could have also been hired by banks at this point to burn crypto as comoetition. I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole before extensive personally conducted research. which is unrealistic even for myself but especially for everyone else.

That would probably jumpstart the adoption. Good point.

I mean that definitely sounds like a cool idea, regardless of the drop shipping idea.

Your comment brings no ounce of new ideas or criticisms to the table, overlooks all the pros and cons already mentioned and assumes you know a lot more thane for example. I run businesses for 15 years, do ethical business since 10 yrs and am thinking from a position of experience.

The reason I dont present myself in a way that screams competence is because this is lemmy and we dont need this stuff. I like spitballing ideas and push new projects for the benefit of the people.

But feel free to suggest constructive things.

I am also pro being able to form your own future by giving an extra hand to the world.

I do however disagree on the part where you have to be born into certain privileges to be able to do this. Yes, giving extra should mean you get extra but all in accordance to individual abilities an privilege. Someone born rich should have it significantly harder to make more than someone born poor for example.

You are overlooking the part where you dont haggle with the seller on amazon, you dont have to look if the item is actually used and just sold as new. You dont have to gauge if its a scam, which is hugely common on ebay. Its more like a platform for experienced buyers with concrete ideas. Not that I would not see a possible ebay alternative here as well but my main focus is on providing unified shopping in every site this platform would ne run on with a closed trust network which could then be expanded.